Language How language works, for a curious pupil: sounds, words and rules, nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs, pronouns, prepositions and conjunctions, kinds of sentences, tenses, irregular verbs and brave mistakes, plurals, grammar puzzles and the spelling traps of their, there and they're.
The language course of Mova's primary school: 55 lessons, 847 sentences, each sentence with its syntax tree and pragmatics. Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0 (Mova corpus 0.4).
1 What language is: sounds, words and rules everyone shares 18 sentences · Language is a code that a whole group of people shares: sounds (or hand signs, or letters) that stand for me… 2 Nouns: the names of things, people, places and ideas 18 sentences · A noun is a naming word: it names a person (girl, Mia), a place (kitchen, London), a thing (cat, mat) or an… 3 Verbs: doing words and being words 18 sentences · A verb tells you what happens or what is: in "The dog barked" the verb is barked, and every full English sen… 4 Adjectives and adverbs: describing things and actions 18 sentences · An adjective describes a noun (a scary dog, a red ball); an adverb tells you more about a verb: how, when, w… 5 Pronouns: I, me, you, they and who 20 sentences · A pronoun stands in for a noun so you don't repeat it: "Mia went to the shop. 6 Prepositions and conjunctions: little words that hold sentences together 16 sentences · Prepositions are small words that show where, when or how things connect: on, under, in, behind, before, aft… 7 Kinds of sentences: statements, questions, commands, exclamations 16 sentences · English has four kinds of sentence: a statement tells (The cake is huge.), a question asks (What is that cak… 8 Tenses: past, present and future 17 sentences · Tense is the form of a verb that shows when something happens: I go (present), I went (past); time words lik… 9 Irregular verbs: goed, brung and other brave mistakes 17 sentences · Most English verbs make the past by adding -ed: jump, jumped; these are regular verbs, but about 200 common… 10 Plurals that make no sense: mice, sheep and geese 18 sentences · Most English plurals just add -s or -es (cat, cats; box, boxes), but some very old words change the vowel in… 11 Grammar puzzles, part one 16 sentences · Grammar puzzles are like maths puzzles with words: each has an exact answer, and the trick is to look at the… 12 Spelling traps: their, there, they're and friends 17 sentences · Some English words sound the same but are spelled differently and mean different things: they're (they are),… 13 Silent letters and the mystery of -ough 16 sentences · A silent letter is written but not said, like the k in knee or the b in lamb; most of them are fossils of so… 14 Punctuation that changes meaning 18 sentences · Punctuation marks are the traffic signs of writing: they tell the reader where to stop, pause, ask or shout,… 15 The apostrophe war 17 sentences · The apostrophe (') has two jobs: it shows missing letters (it's = it is, don't = do not) and it shows belong… 16 Formal and informal: a mate versus the head teacher 19 sentences · Everyone has at least two ways of talking: informal (relaxed and chatty, for mates and family) and formal (c… 17 Slang and how it changes with every generation 16 sentences · Slang is the new, playful, in-group language of a time and a crowd; every generation makes its own, partly s… 18 Accents and dialects of Britain and Ireland 18 sentences · An accent is how people pronounce words; a dialect is a whole local way of speaking, with its own words and… 19 Accents and dialects around the world 15 sentences · English is spoken all over the world, and every place has grown its own accent and words: a fizzy drink is "… 20 Is there one proper English? The big arguments 17 sentences · People have moaned that the young are "ruining English" for hundreds of years: the writer Jonathan Swift com… 21 British and American words 13 sentences · Neither side is wrong: "colour" is right in Britain and "color" is right in America, just as "lift" and "ele… 22 Where English came from 16 sentences · English was not always in England: about 1,500 years ago Angles, Saxons and Jutes sailed over the North Sea… 23 Borrowed words: French, Norse and Latin 16 sentences · At dinner Mum says "We're having beef tonight", not "cow tonight"; after 1066 French-speaking lords ate the… 24 Borrowed words from far away: Hindi, Arabic, Chinese, Ukrainian and more 15 sentences · Words travel with people, ships, trade and food; when English speakers met people from India, the Arab world… 25 Idioms taken literally 16 sentences · An idiom is a group of words whose meaning is not the meaning of its separate words; you have to learn it as… 26 Phrasal verbs: get up, give up, make up 13 sentences · A phrasal verb is a verb plus a small word like up, out, on, in or off, and together they make a new meaning… 27 Homophones: words that sound the same 14 sentences · Ava reads "The knight rode at night" and frowns: out loud the two words are twins, but on paper they wear di… 28 Puns and jokes that need a pun 16 sentences · A pun is a joke that uses a word or sound with two meanings at once, so your brain flips between them and th… 29 Sarcasm and tone of voice 17 sentences · Sarcasm is saying the opposite of what you mean, usually to show you're annoyed or to tease; the words say o… 30 Texting, abbreviations and emoji 14 sentences · Texting is a new kind of writing that behaves a lot like talking: short, fast, and full of codes like "brb",… 31 How babies learn to talk 14 sentences · Babies start learning language before they can say a single word: newborns already prefer their mother's voi… 32 Sign language 15 sentences · Sign languages are full, real languages made with the hands, face and body, with their own words and their o… 33 Ukrainian compared with English 15 sentences · Ukrainian and English are distant cousins in the same huge language family, but they solve the same jobs in… 34 Mandarin compared with English 16 sentences · Mandarin Chinese is the language with the most native speakers on Earth, and it works very differently from… 35 French compared with English 12 sentences · French is English's closest neighbour in words: after 1066 French-speaking rulers poured thousands of words… 36 Grammar puzzles, part two 15 sentences · Words are like Lego: you can flip them, shuffle their letters, read them backwards and give them new jobs, a… 37 Building words: prefixes, suffixes and compounds 15 sentences · Long words are often built from smaller parts, like a train made of carriages: a root in the middle, a prefi… 38 Words that changed their meaning 17 sentences · Words are not frozen: over hundreds of years their meanings drift, like boats slowly carried along by a rive… 39 Talking well: politeness, listening and saying sorry 14 sentences · Talking well is not only about the right words; it's about how you treat the person in front of you: thankin… 40 The big language quiz 15 sentences · This is the last lesson of the language course: a big quiz that visits everything, from word classes and plu… 41 Alice's word games: puns, parodies and nonsense 12 sentences · «Alice's Adventures in Wonderland» is a book you can read twice: once for the story, and once for the word g… 42 Kipling's word games: «Best Beloved», the 'Stute Fish, «Humph!» and the great grey-green, greasy Limpopo 12 sentences · Kipling wrote the «Just So Stories» to be read aloud, the way he first told them to his own children at bedt… 43 Pan, panic and Ulysses: the old myths and old words inside «The Wind in the Willows» 15 sentences · The book never names him, but he is Pan, a god from the myths of ancient Greece. 44 Starving, a million times and a ton: everyday hyperbole 16 sentences · Hyperbole (say it hy-PER-bo-lee) means making something sound much bigger, longer or heavier than it really… 45 Dead, a mile long and everyone: more everyday hyperbole 12 sentences · People use the biggest words they know for everyday feelings: «I'm DEAD», «the queue's a mile long», «EVERYO… 46 Which number counts? Hyperbole and real numbers in maths 12 sentences · Word problems and real life are full of numbers, but not every number is there to be counted. 47 The best ever and shocking: adverts and headlines 11 sentences · Adverts and headlines use hyperbole for a job: to make you buy, click or read. 48 My dad could lift a car: playground boasting 12 sentences · In the playground, boasts fly like footballs. 49 A bit nippy and not ideal: British understatement 16 sentences · Understatement is the opposite of hyperbole: it makes things sound SMALLER than they are. 50 Not unhappy and not half: litotes 16 sentences · Litotes (say it LIE-toe-teez) is a special kind of understatement: you say something good by saying «not» pl… 51 Just a scratch and I'm fine: when to worry and tell an adult 17 sentences · Sometimes playing down is dangerous. 52 Sarcasm, hyperbole and understatement side by side 13 sentences · Three kinds of talk bend the truth in three different ways. 53 Told you a hundred times: how other languages exaggerate and play down 15 sentences · Every language exaggerates and plays things down, but each one picks its own pictures. 54 Off with her head and the finest house on the river: Alice and Toad 16 sentences · Lewis Carroll and Kenneth Grahame both loved hyperbole and understatement, and they made jokes out of them. 55 ★★★ Olympiad: hyperbole and downplaying puzzles 9 sentences · Each one hides a trap: a real number next to a fake one, a word that is hyperbole in one place and plain tru… ← previous Historynext → Lessons↑ back to the school This page in Markdown → https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/